Religion Dispatches
…ccurred to me it would be a very easy to make hajj from there. I bought an airline ticket and was in contact with the family of one of my graduate school friends. They would pick me up from the airport and host me during my stay and the days of ritual. Nice plan. So I went to the embassy to get the visa and was denied because (as an American) I needed proof that I was Muslim. How do I prove I have been a practicing Muslim for a decade? I went to t…
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…alse—swept through the terminals, sending passengers, law-enforcement, and airline workers scrambling for cover and eventually onto the tarmac. The responding authorities found neither shooters nor evidence of any shots fired. The most likely explanation offered for the panic was that the cheering of Olympics fans for Usain Bolt’s performance in the 100 meters sounded like gunfire. In an episode titled “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” from…
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…ual recompense. In the video message that was played before my last United Airlines flight, you expressed your desire to greet each and every passenger; you invited us to sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight. If I could greet you now, I would want to know: were you unaware of the monstrosity that was about to follow? There, rising above the hiss of the pressurized air, as the video monitors snapped to the image of an engorged sun bursting from be…
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…married in first month; Lutheran priests barred from officiating More than 800 same-sex couples were married in March after marriage equality went into effect on the first of the month; 770 had already been in civil partnerships. The Lutheran Evangelical Church has decreed that priests are not permitted to marry same-sex couples and some bishops warned that those who do would face “consequences.” From a March 1 story: In spite of the church rulin…
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No other end-of-year list can hope to offer such profound juxtapositions: a groundbreaking female Mennonite pastor alongside an “immortalist”; the transcendent wisdom of a civil rights leader alongside one of the most hate-filled religious figures in contemporary memory. But here it is, a connect-the-dots portrait of a powerfully complicated American religious landscape, circa 2014. Vincent Gordon Harding Historian and theologian Vincent Gordon H…
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…aths may not have been the elite American military cadre some hours ago in Pakistan, but the legion of cell phone-toting protestors earlier this year in Tahrir Square. They have helped to complete the erosion of legitimacy that has undermined the jihadi activists in recent years within the Muslim world. For the past thirty years, the jihadi movement has crested on a wave of popular unrest and been propelled by the moral legitimacy given by th…
Read More…military presence in Afghanistan and the extensive US military campaign in Pakistan that is believed to have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Pakistani civilians in air strikes. Even within the original al Qaeda bin Laden has probably not played a central operational role for many years, though he remained an influential voice and symbol. The organization has cultivated a new set of charismatic leaders such as Abu Yahya al-Libi and ‘Atiyyatul…
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…ers who might be worried that this Charter isn’t kosher. And my friends in Pakistan are also doing interesting things. They’re having to proceed very slowly because things are so terrible in Pakistan. People are getting blown up every day. Nonetheless they are simply getting on with it. I think the Charter has been put up in about fourteen places all over the country—in the Karachi Press Club, for example. This means that in trouble spots, the ide…
Read More…final vote rejected seven proposed amendments put forth by Egypt, Uganda, Pakistan, South Sudan and other countries that sought to strip LGBT-specific language from the proposal… LGBT advocates earlier this week expressed concern that South Africa would not support the latest resolution, but in the end the country backed it. Ambassador Abdul Samad Minty, who is South Africa’s permanent U.N. representative in Geneva, said after the vote that the r…
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…a much narrower focus on jihad and terrorism. Considering the Gallup poll numbers, which indicate that the more religious a person claims to be, the less tolerant they are of militancy and violence, how do you explain your moving from how Muslims conceive of Shari’ah to a narrower and more securitized frame of Shari’ah, which seems to exclude many Muslim experiences of Shari’ah outside certain crisis areas, like Pakistan and Afghanistan? Structu…
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